The Ghost-Faced Man’s mask was hard as iron, but a flying shard still cut a small gash on his forehead.
Seeing beads of crimson blood trickle down the cold, ghastly mask, Pei Lianyi found his courage again. He clenched his jaw and said, “I don’t care who you are. If you leave now, I can spare your life.”
Just then, the man slowly let out an “Ah,” as if slightly displeased by the pain of the wound, or perhaps as a mockery of Pei Lianyi’s failure to grasp the situation.
“Master Pei, are you hurt?” Huo Jingzhao leaned close to his face and asked with a smile.
Pei Lianyi was momentarily stunned. The other’s tone felt so familiar, as if he had heard it somewhere before.
But he quickly realized the man was mocking him, finding it amusing that he’d managed to hurt himself just by swinging a small vase.
“You…” Pei Lianyi trembled with anger, his lips quivering.
Just as he was about to use the nearby Wolf Hair Brush to stab at the man’s eyes, the other, as if anticipating it, suddenly pinned him down onto the table.
“A slender beauty like you, so delicate you might break… always shouting about killing and fighting isn’t good…” Huo Jingzhao murmured lowly. His large palm gently stroked Pei Lianyi’s fingers, lingering like a lover’s caress.
“Your fingers are even thinner than this brush.”
Delicate and flexible, with perfect tension and release. Truly a pair of beautiful hands.
“Uh… ah.” Having not been touched like this for so many years, Pei Lianyi felt a moment of bewilderment.
And in the next second, the man viciously snapped the Wolf Hair Brush in two. His tone turned utterly sinister.
“Pei Lianyi, you should be glad your father here is wearing a mask. Without it, there wouldn’t be a single patch of unspoiled skin left on your body.”
Hearing the harsh crack of the brush breaking, Pei Lianyi’s shoulders jerked. The bravado he’d had moments before when striking out vanished completely, replaced by deep panic and fear.
Staring at the Ghost Warrior Mask just an inch from his face, his complexion pale, his throat constricted, he asked:
“Are you going to bite me to death? You fiend! I have no grudge against you! Why… why do you want to torment me…?”
Before Huo Jingzhao could answer, Pei Lianyi, in his terror, raised his voice to a hoarse cry: “You want to eat someone… then… then just make it quick!”
With that, he shut his eyes, steeled his heart, and abruptly tilted his head back, offering his clean, pristine neck directly to the ghost mask’s mouth, as if offering himself up for a bite.
Huo Jingzhao admitted that, in that moment, he swallowed hard. More than that, Pei Lianyi’s naive, inexperienced reaction thoroughly delighted him.
He’s already borne a child, yet he still appears so unworldly in this aspect.
“Master Pei’s courage is indeed admirable. But I prefer to start eating from the fleshier parts.”
After tossing out these words, Huo Jingzhao began to undo Pei Lianyi’s buttons with the urgency of unwrapping a gift.
Sensing the man’s heated breath, Pei Lianyi finally understood what he intended to do.
“No, don’t touch me—! Don’t touch me! Someone… someone, ahh!” He struggled violently, his cries instantly changing pitch.
Seeing him tremble like a sieve, Huo Jingzhao frowned and abruptly stopped his movements.
Such a fine voice… it would be a shame to ruin it, he thought silently.
Seeing him motionless, Pei Lianyi thought his resistance had worked. Enduring his fear, he gasped, “I am a man… even if I have flesh, I can’t… can’t do this kind of thing with a ghost! If you want to marry and mate, the manor has plenty of lovely women. But I alone… cannot.”
Just as he was stammering, Huo Jingzhao suddenly lowered his head and sniffed his hair, sighing with pleasure:
“You smell so good… Father-in-law.”
A roaring sound exploded in Pei Lianyi’s ears. All the blood in his body rushed to his face. Watching the man’s head wound, which had already scabbed over with blood, he summoned every ounce of strength to raise his hand. He was just about to tear off that mask when, overcome by shock, his vision went black and he fainted.
Feeling the person in his arms go limp, Huo Jingzhao, who had been fully aroused, froze.
“Tch. So fragile, aren’t you?” He sneered with a cold huff, watching Pei Lianyi’s body slump from his embrace.
Though feeling a bit of a buzzkill, Huo Jingzhao still grabbed a Fleece Blanket from the bed and tucked it under Pei Lianyi’s waist.
“Carrying you to bed would be easy enough. But I don’t feel like it right now.” He crouched down, scrutinizing the face that was still flushed even in unconsciousness, and spoke in a low voice.
“Because… heh,” because once he got him onto that bed, this man would truly die at his hands.
He didn’t continue, just chuckled with his head bowed. His obsidian-like eyes, behind the mask, flickered and flashed, concealing his volatile emotions.
After staring for a long while, to prevent Pei Lianyi from discovering any clues upon waking, Huo Jingzhao meticulously began to clean up the fragments of the broken Wolf Hair Brush on the floor.
He had just tucked the pieces into his chest when a black shadow suddenly flashed behind him.
“Who’s there—?! It’s you…” Huo Jingzhao’s senses jolted in alarm. He raised his palm to strike at the shadow, but seeing it roll in the darkness, he suppressed his Internal Energy and pulled back his hand.
“Meow…” A little gray cat padded out from the darkness, blinking at him.
Huo Jingzhao had seen this cat before. It used to follow the little beggars at the City God Temple to beg… After being taken in by Pei Lianyi, it had begun living a comfortable life of “no worries for food or clothing.”
Pei Lianyi treated cats and dogs better than he treated people. A cat could get close to him, a cat’s mistakes would be forgiven. If a cat rolled around in his arms, he would say, “Oh, poor thing…”
But if you replaced the cat with a person, he would only frown lightly.
Thinking of this, a fire of frustration burned in Huo Jingzhao’s gut again.
Perhaps sensing the ominous aura around the man, the little gray cat tucked in its paws and lay down facing him, a gesture of appeasement.
Huo Jingzhao watched with amusement. After a moment, he suddenly raised his hand and took off his mask, revealing red-rimmed eyes. He bared his teeth at the little cat.
“Ha—”
“Meow—!!” Although the man was devastatingly handsome, under the ghostly pale moonlight, his red eyes and bulging veins on his neck made him look like a demon from the netherworld. The little gray cat leaped straight up in fright, yowling to flee.
Truly, a cat follows its master…
Huo Jingzhao’s large hand swept out and captured the fleeing cat. He held it up, examining it before his eyes.
The cat was tiny; he could hold it in one hand.
“Wuu ao… meow.” The extremely frightened little gray cat stiffened, looking towards the unconscious Pei Lianyi.
“Hoping he’ll save you…?” Huo Jingzhao raised an eyebrow, clicked his tongue, and sighed. “Too bad he can’t even save himself right now.”
Saying this, he placed the trembling cat onto Pei Lianyi’s body. Taking a cat’s paw, he pressed it onto the man’s chest, manipulating the paw to knead there.
“Does he usually let you touch this place?” Watching the cat’s paw press little indentations into Pei Lianyi’s soft flesh, Huo Jingzhao’s Adam’s apple subtly bobbed.
The cat naturally couldn’t answer him, but the unconscious Pei Lianyi stirred.
He reflexively hugged the little cat. Faint words escaped his lips:
“Ziying… Daddy doesn’t have any milk… stop fussing.”
These words rolled down like a clap of thunder. Huo Jingzhao’s legs stiffened, his eyes went blank. It was a long while before he stumbled back several steps with a clatter. Only after hurriedly putting his mask back on could he suppress the heat on his face.
“Young Sect Master, the people outside are about to wake up.” At that moment, a voice from the doorway interrupted Huo Jingzhao’s thoughts.
A Hidden Guard, dressed in a purple martial outfit with a face as fine as jade, had silently appeared at the door, addressing him respectfully.
“Don’t come in…!”
Sang Sha was just about to step over the threshold when Huo Jingzhao immediately raised a hand to stop him.
“Young Sect Master…” Sang Sha’s foot hung in mid-air. Having followed Huo Jingzhao for so many years, this was the first time he’d heard the man speak so loudly, as if… in a desperate hurry to hide something.
And then, right before Sang Sha’s utterly astonished eyes, Huo Jingzhao began tidying up the room. First, he tore off a piece of cloth and wiped the tiny blood droplets from the floor, then moved to the desk and neatly arranged the items on top.
Oh… so he wasn’t here to kill, after all. Sang Sha glanced at Pei Lianyi lying on the floor and helplessly pulled his foot back.
Still, Huo Jingzhao never played by the rules. There was nothing too surprising about it.
The world knew the Nine Blossoms Sect on Ziyun Peak as the foremost martial sect under heaven. Their disciples were not only skilled in martial arts but also well-versed in astronomy, calendar systems, and mechanical arts, renowned for divining heavenly secrets and predicting national fortune. Even the Emperor would inquire of the Sect Master’s opinion before performing ritual sacrifices to Heaven…
The Young Sect Master of the Nine Blossoms Sect was around twenty years old. It was said he had received the Sect Master’s true teachings, discerning a rare once-in-a-century locust plague at the age of ten. With a flowery whip in hand, his martial arts were superb, his manner elegant and unrestrained, drawing throngs of admirers of both sexes…
No one could ever imagine that the legendary Young Sect Master, rumored never to lack for beauties, would stage a night raid on his future father-in-law and then lie on the floor wiping it clean.
This was Sang Sha’s sixth year by his side. Upon first meeting Huo Jingzhao, he too, like the city’s populace, had almost been deceived by the man’s gentle, jade-like exterior.
Before long, he discovered that the previous several Hidden Guards had all vanished, coinciding with Huo Jingzhao’s sporadic, violent outbursts.
Sang Sha didn’t know where they went. But in the sect, on the ninth of every month, after the Young Sect Master left the Sect Master’s chambers, some people would disappear.
“Sang, do what I tell you to do. Don’t ask so many questions.”
“…Yes.”
Sang Sha figured the reason he had survived this long was mostly due to his silence.
For instance, today, to infiltrate the Pei Manor, he’d followed Huo Jingzhao’s orders and used a drug to seal everyone’s sleep acupoints. When they woke, the entire manor would be lit again. Their brief slumber would seem to them like merely a momentary lapse.
But the one in this room… might be plunged into tremendous confusion. Sang Sha’s peripheral vision swept over Pei Lianyi’s elegant hem.
“You’re even more easily startled than your cat.” Perhaps finished cleaning, Huo Jingzhao leaned down again and whispered into Pei Lianyi’s ear.
Listening to his coarse, husky tone, Sang Sha felt a wave of heat rise to his own face.
Then the man snapped the incense in the burner and strode out the door.
“Young Sect Master… ugh!”
“Go find out what kind of incense this is. From now on, the entire sect is to use this incense.”
Before Sang Sha could even speak, Huo Jingzhao pressed the still-burning incense ash into his hand.
